Client introversion and counseling session impact.

The impact of counseling sessions cannot be assumed to be uniform across clients but may vary systematically with clients' personality characteristics. Insofar as personal counseling is a social encounter, introverted clients may be expected to experience greater distress in sessions than extraverted clients. This expectation was confirmed in two samples of clients in a university clinic, who completed the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory during their treatment and completed the Session Evaluation Questionnaire immediately after their sessions. With differences among counselors statistically controlled, relatively introverted (higher Social Introversion) clients rated their sessions as relatively uncomfortable, unpleasant, tense, rough, and difficult and rated their postsession mood as relatively unfriendly, uncertain, sad, angry, and afraid. Conversely, relatively gregarious, overactive, extraverted (higher Hypomania) clients rated their sessions as relatively comfortable, pleasant, relaxed, smooth, and easy. A corollary of the patient uniformity assumption, one of Kiesler's (1966) myths of counseling and psychotherapy research, is that in-session procedures are experienced similarly by all clients. That both the assumption and its corollary are false seems evident when they are stated explicitly. Nevertheless, there is little systematic knowledge of which client characteristics predict how counseling will be experienced. Such knowledge could help theorists account for variability in clients' response to treatments. In this study, we addressed the general hypothesis that counseling session impact--the session's immediate effect (Stiles, 1980)----is predictable to some extent from clients' personality characteristics. Following Orlinsky and Howard's (1975) question, What kinds of experience do different kinds of people have in therapy? (p. 4), we asked more specifically how clients' introversion or extraversion predicts their evaluation of their sessions and their postsession mood. Orlinsky and Howard's (1975) impact research focused on clients' demographic characteristics, such as age, sex, marital and parental status, education, and number of siblings. For example, clients who had experienced a family breakup during childhood or who had gone through a divorce seemed more ready to accept the therapist's helpfulness, according to clients' session ratings. Female clients between 20 and 26 years old who had some college education, were single with no children, and came from a disrupted family background tended to experience collaborative progress in therapy. Neither Odinsky and Howard (1967, 1975, 1977) nor others who have studied session impact